Tribeca 2022: Ray Romano’s Directorial Debut ‘Somewhere in Queens’

By Abe Friedtanzer 

Nearly two decades after the end of his beloved, Emmy-winning sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, Ray Romano continues to churn out consistently solid work. His follow-up TV shows include Men of a Certain Age and the just-cancelled Made for Love. He also starred opposite Mark Duplass in the underrated Paddleton, which you can stream on Netflix. And now he’s stepped behind the camera to direct himself in the very funny Somewhere in Queens, featuring a very loud family of Italians with plenty of spoken and unspoken issues.

The role Romano plays is one that tracks with his resume, that of a moderately awkward husband and father who hasn’t achieved much success in his life...

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Tweetweek: Madonna Bootcamp at Wayne Manor

This is actually a great question. 

People keep listing Robert Pattinson's acting credentials to show he’s more than Twilight, but what I wanna know is when did we as a society decide playing a vampire was silly and playing Batman was prestige

— Kenny Keil (@kennykeil) March 5, 2022

More curated tweets involving The Godfather, The Power of the Dog, the genius of Laurie Metcalf, the upcoming Madonna biopic, and of course The Batman are after the jump...

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Who's Next to the Triple Crown?

by Eric Blume

I’m sure we’ve all found ourselves in some sort of YouTube hole at some point during lockdown.  Mine has led me to rewatching snippets from Tony Awards ceremonies from about a decade ago.  I had completely forgotten that Eddie Redmayne had won a Tony for his work in the play Art, which is strange because I saw his performance in that show and he was staggeringly good.  He absolutely deserved that Tony.

I then realized that since he has since won an Oscar, he is only an Emmy away from the Triple Crown of Acting.  This triple-crown honor (you can see the actors who have won all three big awards of the Tony, Oscar, and Emmy here) has been nabbed by only 24 actors in the history of show business awards!  It’s a very elusive accomplishment and prestigious list of people. In just the last five years, though, there's been a lot of movement -- we've recently seen Helen Mirren, Frances McDormand, Jessica Lange, Viola Davis, and Glenda Jackson all secure this title.

That got me to thinking:  wow, it seems highly likely that Eddie Redmayne would find a big role in a series or miniseries to win that Emmy and be in this company?  He’s young, still at the top of his game, and while I don’t think he’s quite in the league of the other major actors who have won all three, he is surely a likely candidate.

But who are some others...

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Links: Madame X, Shelley Winters, and Martha Again

Link roundup starting with NEWS articles...

• NYT The great Swedish actress Bibi Andersson, a Bergman regular (Persona, Wild Strawberries) dies at 83
• Cartoon Brew Rich Moore, who delivered the Wreck It Ralph movies for Disney leaves to run Sony Animation
• Deadline Gabriel Basso (The Kings of Summer, Super 8) nabs lead in Ron Howard's movie adaptation of bestseller Hillbilly Elegy. Amy Adams and Glenn Close co-star.
• The Wrap talks to Ryan O'Connell, the creator and star of the gay & disabled sitcom Special on Netflix

Lots more after the jump including In the Heights, Bond 25, the influence of Big, new albums, declining sex in the cinema, and two must-reads online this past week in case you missed them...

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Stage Door: Hillary and Clinton

We're seeing a lot of theater in the run up to the Tonys. Here's new contributor J.B.

For the last twenty years or so, and probably longer, well-crafted stories about women in politics told on stage or screen have frequently been described with words like “timely” or “vital.”  These stories, in many cases, are ones we haven’t heard before, and to the extent we as a society want our art to imitate life (and indeed, vice versa), they are, now more than ever, ones we need to hear.

It is for this reason that Hillary and Clinton, a well-crafted story about the quintessential woman in American politics now playing at the John Golden Theater in New York, feels like such an anomaly. The play, written by Lucas Hnath and directed by Joe Mantello (his SEVENTH production on Broadway in just the last three years), takes place in a hotel room during the thick of the 2008 New Hampshire Democratic Primary and offers an imagined glimpse into what exactly the titular characters (played by Tony-winners Laurie Metcalf and John Lithgow, respectively) may have been thinking, feeling, and communicating to each other at that precise place and time in history...

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